Scientific-Humanitarian Committee

The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (German: Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, WhK) was founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin in May 1897, to campaign for social recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and against their legal persecution.^[1]^[2]^[3] It was the first LGBT rights organization in history.^[3]^[4]^[5] The motto of the organization was "Per scientiam ad justitiam" ("through science to justice"), and the committee included representatives from various professions.^[4]^[2] The committee's membership peaked at about 700 people.^[4] In 1929, Kurt Hiller took over as chairman of the group from Hirschfeld. At its peak, the WhK had branches in approximately 25 cities in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.

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[Music Intro] >>Hi. I’m Devon Dean, content director here at ProjectManager.com. Today I’m going to teach you how to help sell your project using a project proposal. A key thing to remember is that people buy from people. Don’t expect the project proposal document that you put together to be taken up by the decision makers in an organization in isolation of any communication you’ve had with them and award funding and resources and mindshare to that project. It’s important to remember this because you can write the best project proposal document but without that people interaction you have a slim to no chance of getting your project funded. While you’re preparing the project proposal document it’s really important for you, your project sponsors and the champions of your project to go out there and actively lobby the decision makers of your organization about your project. Use those lobbying sessions and those one on one meetings to actually refine and hone your understanding of what the problems are in your organization and the benefits that your project can actually realize, that strike a chord with those decision makers. In developing your project proposal document I highly recommend in tandem going out there and actively seeking the feedback of those decision makers so that feedback help you refine and forge the sales pitch you put together in your proposal document. Your decision makers are going to make the decision whether to thrill or kill that project within the first five minutes of picking up your project proposal document so it’s really, really critical that you make a big impact right at the start of that project proposal document. The way you do that is in stating that problem statement. You really need to paint a bleak picture of your organization that shows or depicts the problems that you’re having in the organization which could be overcome had your project been in production when those problems occurred. Highlight some specific examples of where opportunities were missed or where risk or costs were incurred that your project could have prevented or could have gained access to in terms of opportunities if your project had delivered by the time of that event. Efficiency gains or general skills uplift are not the messages you want to communicate in terms of looking for those problem benefits. By saying that Sally works 50 hours a week and your project is going to solve that problem is really not going to strike a chord for those decision makers. Look for those specific examples of where your company missed an opportunity or incurred costs because your project wasn’t in place. Put those in your problem statement. Now the vision statement is a section that needs to tie your project to the company’s long range strategy and vision and long range goals. Without tying your project in to your organizational strategy and vision you run the risk of having your project being looked upon as a rogue project: it’s out there in the distance, it really doesn’t fit with what we’re doing so you run a risk of not having your project being funded because of that reason. You need to tie your project into your company’s organizational strategies and vision. Benefits further expand upon the vision that your project will have, that you paint the picture of that vision. You’re going into a bit more specific details on what are the things your project will deliver, what new capabilities or what costs you’re going to avoid by having the project deliverables in place. Be very specific about the benefits and make sure they’re things that are measurable. The deliverables section further goes into another level of decomposition about what your project is going to deliver. It talks about the artefacts which your projects will deliver and how those will be delivered in terms of what the users can expect. A deliverable might be, for example, for a call center project you’re delivering new computer telephony integration. That would be a deliverable when that call center has that equipment. Success criteria are very important to outline in that project proposal. You need to be able to have smart success criteria which mean it’s specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound. These success criteria, once they’re met, give the project owners, the decision makers and the stakeholders 100% confidence that your project has achieved success. It’s important that you list out those criteria which everyone is looking at your project to deliver. The next section is talking about how your project is going to achieve the deliverables and success criteria and benefits. In here is where your deadlines are listed, where the project plan comes together and what the approach to delivery might be for your project. Are you going to use external vendors? Are you going to use internal staff? Are you going to use an agile approach to delivering that project or are you going to use a more traditional waterfall method to enable your project to deliver on its deliverables? Lastly, of course, the cost and the budget. Here’s where you pull it together and you show the funding plan for that project and how it’s going to achieve its deadlines against those deliverables and for the dollar value. Now if you find in the first section that you’re getting into quite a lot of detail that runs past, let’s say, two pages I think it’s really important to take the time and consolidate all the high points from these into an executive summary for that document. Put the high level problem, visions and benefits in that exec summary. As I mentioned before, decision makers will take about five minutes looking at your proposal to make sure that it’s something they’re going to fund or decide that they’re not going to fund it in this year. Ensuring those messages are concise is really critical and by putting these elements into executive summary if you find them going long is a really important way for you to quickly communicate those ideas. It’s important to remember the flow of the document in the proposal. You need it to flow like a fiction book. You need to tell a story and paint a picture and leave no stone unturned for your decision makers to ponder. Everything needs to flow from the start of the problem down to the cost and benefits in terms of the key themes of your project need to be expounded upon, need to be mentioned at the start and then further drilled down upon throughout the rest of your project proposal. If you have items that you’re introducing in your deliverables, for example, that don’t fit in with solving the problems you’ve identified up here or fit in with the benefits that you’re going to realize your decision makers will look at that and it will cause them to think a little bit more about your proposal in terms of does this proposal really communicate in a tight way the objectives that it’s going to achieve for the organization. It needs to flow. All the items here need to mesh with one another and not introduce any new topics or any new items as you go along in the project document. Your project proposal is one key way for you to communicate your project’s vision and benefits to the organization but a project proposal in itself is not going to sell your project and get it funded and resourced. Only you can do that. Only your champions and your sponsor can do that. Like I said in the start, the proposal will help you sell your project and get it funded and resourced but really you need to be there actively lobbying for that project and getting it off the ground. For more project management tips and tricks and to try out our software come join us at ProjectManager.com.

History

The WhK was founded in Berlin-Charlottenburg, a locality of Berlin, on 14 or 15 May 1897 (about four days before Oscar Wilde's release from prison) by Magnus Hirschfeld, a physician, sexologist and outspoken advocate for gender and sexual minorities. Original members of the WhK included Hirschfeld, publisher Max Spohr, lawyer Eduard Oberg and writer Franz Joseph von Bülow.^[6]^[4] Adolf Brand, Benedict Friedländer, Hermann von Teschenberg and Kurt Hiller also joined the organization. A split in the organization occurred in December 1906, led by Friedländer.^[7]

*Vita homosexualis*, a 1902 collection of August Fleischmann's popular pamphlets on third gender and against §175 - a Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee library copy, confiscated on 6 May 1933, annotated on the endpaper: **By Reichspräsident's decree of 28.02.1933 destined for destruction!** and hidden from the publique (label "Secr.") as Nazi plunder by the Prussian State Library. This book, and other that may have survived the destruction of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee and the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, are sought after by the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft in Berlin.^[8]

The committee was based in the Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin until the institute's destruction at the hands of Nazis in 1933. The WhK was affiliated with the World League for Sexual Reform, another group founded by Hirschfeld which had similar aims to the committee.^[9] The committee had ties to gay organizations across the world, and from 1906 onward the body which crafted the committee's policy was made up of members from several European countries.^[10]^[11] A branch in Vienna, Austria was opened in 1906, led by Joseph Nicoladoni and Wilhelm Stekel.^[10] In 1911, the Dutch branch of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was formed by Jacob Schorer [nl].^[12]

The WhK took a great deal of scientific theories on human sexuality from the institute such as the idea of a third sex between a man and a woman. The initial focus of the committee was to repeal Paragraph 175, an anti-gay piece of legislation of the Imperial Penal Code, which criminalized "coitus-like" acts between males. It also sought to demonstrate the innateness of homosexuality and thus make the criminal law against sodomy in Germany at the time inapplicable.

In campaigning against Paragraph 175, the committee argued that homosexuality was not a disease or moral failing, and said they reached this conclusion from scientific evidence. The group made other arguments against this law, saying for example that its repeal would reduce blackmailing behavior among male prostitutes.^[13] Beginning in 1919 and 1920, the WhK allied with other homosexual rights groups including the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Special) and Deutscher Freundschaftsverband (German Friendship Association) to oppose the law.^[14] Another alliance held by the committee in its activism against Paragraph 175 was with the <i>Deutscher Bund für Mutterschutz</i> [de] (German League for the Protection of Motherhood), especially after proponents of Paragraph 175 proposed extending it to women.^[15]^[4]

The committee created sex-education pamphlets on the topic of homosexuality and distributed them to the public.^[4] It had begun distributing this type of material to university students and factory laborers as early as 1903.^[12] They also assisted defendants in criminal trials, and gathered more than 6,000 signatures on a petition for the repeal of Paragraph 175.^[16]^[17] The committee's opposition was not indiscriminate, as its petition did support preservation of criminal status for some homosexual acts, including cases between an adult and a minor under age 16.^[15]^[18] At the time of the original proposal, the age of consent was in fact two years lower than that for heterosexual people, at age 14; effectively they called for the age of consent to be raised as part of their campaign.^[18]

Work on promoting their petition began in 1897, and the committee particularly wanted signatures from those with prominent status in such fields as politics, medicine, art, and science. They sent thousands of letters to key figures such as Catholic priests, judges, lawmakers, journalists, and mayors. August Bebel signed the petition and took copies to the Reichstag to urge colleagues to add their names. Other signatories included Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Leo Tolstoy.^[3]

During World War I, supporters and members went to fight in the war. Some of its publications were affected by censorship during this time period. The petition campaign largely fell by the wayside until the war was over. Hirschfeld focused on showcasing the experiences of homosexual soldiers; he collected thousands of letters, interviews, and surveys with such soldiers.^[15]^[19] Petitions were submitted in 1898, 1922, and 1925, but failed to gain the support of the parliament. The law continued to criminalize homosexuality until 1969 and was not entirely removed in West Germany until four years after East and West Germany became one country in 1994.

Officially, the committee was non-partisan politically, and made efforts to appeal to parliamentarians from many parties. This sometimes even included conservative parties such as the Bavarian People's Party (BVP). However, Hirschfeld was a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Some other leaders in the group had revolutionary or pacifist sympathies.^[14] While the committee was somewhat informally associated with the SPD, they were also alienated by the SPD's rhetorical exploitation of Ernst Röhm's homosexuality as a means to harm the Nazi Party politically. After seeing these attacks against Röhm in a newspaper aligned with the SPD, the committee responded, "The statements in the Münchner Post, hearkening back to the Apostle Paul and employing the entire vocabulary of our conservative-clerical persecutors, could have been printed without changing a word by the most strictly Catholic press." This conflict of interests caused the committee to privately question the executive of the SPD as to whether they were still in favor of repealing Paragraph 175; the SPD affirmed that was still their position.^[20]

The biological deterministic tendency that Hirschfeld gave to the committee met with opposition within the WhK from the start. But it was not until November 24, 1929 that his internal competitors, above all the Communist Party (KPD) functionary Richard Linsert, succeeded in forcing Hirschfeld to resign. He was succeeded by the Medical Councilor Otto Juliusburger, Kurt Hiller was elected Deputy Chairman and the writer Bruno Vogel became the third member of the new board. Juliusburger led the committee in the short time that elapsed until the committee was dissolved after the Nazi Party came to power in 1933.^[21] The committee's final meeting took place in Peter Limann's apartment on June 8, 1933, with the singular purpose of dissolving the organization.^[22] A reorientation of the WhK that freed it from its scientific isolation was the focus placed on psychological and sociological research instead of biological research.

The committee was based in Berlin and had branches in about 25 German, Austrian and Dutch cities. It had roughly 700 members at its peak and is considered an important milestone in the homosexual emancipation movement.^[23] It existed for thirty-six years.^[15]

Publications

The WhK produced the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types), a publication which reported the committee's activities and contained content ranging from articles about homosexuality among "primitive" people to literary analyses and case studies. It was published regularly from 1899 to 1923 (sometimes quarterly) and more sporadically until 1933. Yearbook was the world's first scientific journal dealing with sexual variants.^[24]^[25]

Another of the WhK's widespread publications was a brochure entitled Was soll das Volk vom dritten Geschlecht wissen? (What Must Our Nation Know about the Third Sex?) that was produced alongside the committee's sexual education lectures. It offered information on homosexuality, pulling largely from the studies of the Institute for Sexual Sciences. The brochure offered a rare case of nonjudgmental insight into the existence of homosexuality and, as such, was frequently distributed by homosexuals to family members or to total strangers on public transport.^[23]

Reformation attempts

In October 1949, Hans Giese joined with Hermann Weber (1882–1955), head of the Frankfurt local group from 1921 to 1933, to re-establish the group in Kronberg. Kurt Hiller worked with them briefly, but stopped due to personal differences after a few months. The group was dissolved in late 1949 or early 1950 and instead formed the Committee for Reform of the Sexual Criminal Laws (Gesellschaft für Reform des Sexualstrafrechts e. V.), which existed until 1960.^[26]^[27]

In 1962 in Hamburg, Kurt Hiller, who had survived Nazi concentration camps and continued to fight against anti-gay repression, tried unsuccessfully to re-establish the WhK.^[28]^[29]

New WhK

In 1998, a new group was formed with the same name.^[30] Growing out of a group against politician Volker Beck in that year's election,^[31] it is similar in name and general subject matter only, and takes more radical positions than the conservative LSVD. In 2001, its magazine Gigi was given a special award by the German Association of Lesbian and Gay Journalists [de].